YCC wants to expand Credit/D/Fail

Science professors won’t support making things more reasonable, students won’t take GPA-killing classes. Seems we’ve reached an impasse.

For the record, I’m content with History of Life. It’s too bad Porn in the Morn lost its Sc though.

Great…because everyone needs a 3.8.

I think the thing that would happen in reality, if this reform comes to pass, would be people (cocky Poli Sci majors with 3.9 GPAs) taking Porn in the Morn or whatever C/D/Fail, which would be the opposite of what we would be aiming for.

Remind me what’s wrong with the current system? Hopefully, the professors don’t budge on this issue.

Just keep revoking distribution credits for guts, encourage departments to offer non-major classes that are widely interesting and challenging (i.e., that aren’t just the pre-major classes that are overly technical for non-majors).

I think that this initiative unfairly favors students in liberal arts majors. Science majors take humanities classes that are filled with actual History and English majors and are expected to handle it.

We should stop pretending that Yale actually awards real grades. With the current Cr/D/F, most students can opt out of work on most of their courses. And in most departments outside the sciences, most grades are A and A-. We do a lot of work, and students stress a lot, over an outcome that is just meaningless.

Of course, we could go back to real grades…

10-

The offerings of non-science classes are wide and diverse. Plenty of guts from which to choose.

But science offerings are tiny, often with barely coherent professors, with unrealistic expectations for prior knowledge and preparation.

Any clown can show up to a history class without prior study and do well. The material is accessible to anyone with a brain.

I never took high school physics. If I try physics at Yale, I will fail. You can’t learn the basics fast enough to catch up. The material is only accessible to those with prior training.

As a history major, I have to agree with those who think this sort of change would be terrible. There are good, non-gut science classes out there that are accessible to non-science majors. In fact, two of my favorite classes at Yale were science classes – Ornithology (E&EB 272) and Galaxies and Cosmology (ASTR 220 – not a total gut like the 100-level Astro courses, in fact, it even counts toward the Astro major). Most humanities majors are simply not interested in spending any time on a science class – it’s not that the non-guts will lower their GPA, so much as that they don’t care to put in any effort, so they look for classes in which that is a possibility.
Yale, rather than allowing distributional requirements to be taken CR/D/F, should do what commenter #5 suggested – take away distributional requirements from guts and from SC classes with little science content.

“Any clown can show up to a history class without prior study and do well. The material is accessible to anyone with a brain.”

Yeah right. Math is a language. So is English. I know so many students who stick to hard sciences because they can’t actually think, argue, and write well in a humanities/non-science class.

And every field, whether physics or english, has a method and process. You will NEVER get that A or A- in an advanced-level class unless you have the analytical training that that field demands.

Don’t get all science-superiority complex on us.

This is a horrible idea. How do you think this will affect Yale’s reputation in the sciences and engineering (which is already far below its peers)?

Credit/D/Fail should not be allowed. What we need instead is to come back to a standard curve (30% A/A-, 50% B+/B/B-, 20% C) that would apply for ALL classes (science and others).

A standard curve is a terrible, terrible idea. What makes you think the top 8-9% of applicants to Yale would show enough variation in performance, relative to the objectives of the course? And in any case, this variation wouldn’t be consistent enough across courses to impose an artificial grade distribution. It is perfectly possible, for example, for all students in a language course to perform at an A level and they should get that A. I’m all for professors demanding a lot out of their students and grading them hard, but all an artificial grade curve does is make people work harder on less important things. The difference between an A and a B shouldn’t be whether you spent that extra hour memorizing unnecessary details.

That said, YCC’s proposal is s terrible idea:

1. Intro science classes are simply too bad. If they are for non-majors, they tend to be frustratingly stupid. If they are pre-major courses, they tend to be too technical and require far more work (read: pointless memorization) than actually does any non-majors any good. (Which is not to say that they’re intellectually demanding or difficult. Science people, understand the difference.)

2. The kind of people who are so concerned about their grades that they are not willing to take classes they find interesting (a strange breed of which I have heard much and seen nothing) are not likely to invest enough time in a CR/D class to make it worth it. If we are concerned about intellectual integrity and the quality of this education, this mentality should be fought, not accommodated.

@19 — right on, grading standards across departments and certainly across disciplines are wildly inconsistent at present

Does anyone who gets a divorce ever say “I FAILED marriage?” Or does anyone who gets cancer ever say “I FAILED health”?

Why do we mindlessly accept this artificial construct called “Fail” which exists only in academia and does untold damage the the psyches of millions of children all over the world? It is almost sadistic.

It should be replaced with NC for “No Credit”.

Even “bankruptcy” isn’t a “fail”. Quite the opposite these days with Chapter Nine.

There is no failure in the “real world”, (except perhaps “failure to thrive”) so let’s abandon “Fail” as a descriptor in the artificial world of academia.

PK
The Anti-Yale